Hospitalists know that many hospitalizations aren’t like those on TV. Instead of being discharged to their homes, many patients are discharged to post-acute care facilities for further care. And those transitions from hospital to post-acute care can be just as challenging as—if not more than—discharges to home care.
Making those transitions safer, smoother, and more effective can not only help an individual patient, but it can have a broader impact, according to the lead author of SHM’s new Post-Acute Care Transitions Toolkit, now available at www.hospitalmedicine.org/pact.
“Post-acute care transitions is an important area where hospitalists can contribute to improving the population health of their community,” says hospitalist Robert Young, MD, of Northwestern University in Chicago.
Both Dr. Young and the new toolkit recommend that hospitalists partner with the post-acute providers to make sure that communication between settings is complete during transitioning and open for ongoing questions as they arise. “Developing a relationship with your post-acute providers to work on these transitions issues provides the opportunity for ongoing quality and process improvement vital to our patients’ care,” Dr. Young says.